Digital image recording, storage, and synthesis are now widely used in television, motion pictures, and video games. A digital video is essentially a series of digital photographs, commonly termed “frames,” of a scene taken at periodic intervals. A digital video may be recorded using a digital video camera, may be created by digitizing an analog video recording or by digitizing a motion picture film recording, may be created by rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics, or even a hybrid combination of all the above with analogue or digital compositing of the various elements to realize a final digital video. To give the viewer an impression of smooth, continuous motion, digital or analog video images are typically comprised of 25, 30, 60, or more frames every second. However, the number of frames per second should not be viewed as a limiting factor to identify a digital video; some digital video formats support as few as 1 frame every N seconds, or even a variable frame rate as necessary to achieve the effect of perceived motion while attempting to reduce the final storage size of the resulting digital video. Whatever the frame rate, each frame may be divided into a plurality of horizontal lines, and each line is typically divided into a plurality of picture elements, commonly termed “pixels”, per line. Standard broadcast video recordings in the United States have 525 lines per frame, and HDTV recordings have 1080 lines per frame. However, for the purposes of this description, the term “digital video” is meant in the broader sense of simply a series of images that when viewed in sequence depict the representation of the passage of time within one or more settings. The number of images, the rate of display of the images, and the dimensions of the images is irrelevant. Yet the images are still conventionally identified as comprised of lines and pixels, even though throughout the various steps of the processes disclosed herein, the number of lines and pixels per frame may be statistically re-sampled, as necessary, for the precision of accuracy required by various steps.
Each frame of a digital video is therefore comprised of some total number of pixels, and each pixel is represented by some number of bits of information indicating the brightness and color of the respective portion of the image. Throughout the plurality of methods that a digital video may be created, all are essentially a series of images, represented as a series of frames composed of lines and pixels. Various means of representing a digital video in bits and bytes exist, but at some level all can be referenced as frames, lines and pixels.
A digital video requires a display medium to view the frames in sequence. A display medium is typically electronic, such as a TV, computer and monitor, a cellular phone or a personal digital assistant (PDA). These devices receive or possess the digital video in the form of a file, and display the frames in sequence to the user. Other potential display mediums that are not electronic exist, which are also a method for a user to experience a digital video. Examples of these mediums are 1) printed holograms of the nature found on credit/debit cards and collectable sports cards, 2) digital paper that employs chemical and other non-electronic image encoding methods, 3) simple printed flipbooks.